Stark’s universe is populated with characters – her lovers, her students, the young disadvantaged men she invites to her studio (a couple of whom have robbed her), her son – whom she supports or “feeds,” and who eventually become her raw material
” But Stark herself admits that her own stance toward Bobby Jesus and the other men she has been inspired by can seem strikingly mannish (“or whatever the female term for womanizer is,” she jokes). It is hard not to think of Andy Warhol benaughty login, who also cultivated a vivid cast of players to star in his dramas, both in real life and in art – treating his Factory as a kind of living social experiment. “People have suggested that it’s exploitative,” Stark confided to me one day about Bobby Jesus. “But he’s aware of what he’s doing. And he wants to be a star.”
One might think of the artist-writers Sophie Calle, who has revisited letters from jilted and jilting lovers, and Chris Kraus, who diarized her obsessions to thrilling effect in the autobiographical novel “I Love Dick
Stark has long been interested in the vexed questions of wealth and class, especially as they manifest in the art world where, she says, quoting a friend, everyone works “one-percent adjacent.” She grew up with working-class parents (her father was an electrical engineer; her mother worked for a phone company, plugging in the wire connections “like Lily Tomlin”). As a teenager, Stark describes herself as a “kind of punk rocker”; she was voted “most spirited” in junior high and, at 14 or 15, tattooed a peace symbol on her ankle with a sewing needle, as a way “to wrap my head around the dawn of the Reagan area.” At 21, she set a motorcycle land-speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, her second time on a street bike. She points out that this was well before Rachel Kushner’s ethrowers.”
Her greatest influence might have been the late artist Mike Kelley, with whom Stark studied at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and who better than any other artist captured the dark, angsty spirit of American suburban youth, which included album covers, processions, videos and creepy sculptural assemblages of toys. “He seemed like a rock star basically,” she said in a presentation she made in honor of Kelley in 2014, “but like, insanely intelligent, and also the work had to do with class issues that kind of came up for me.” After graduating, she held various odd jobs, including working at Macy’s in Atlanta in the men’s section selling Tommy Hilfiger and Polo Ralph Lauren (“five out of 10 transactions were theft-related”); chauffeuring the artist Sigmar Polke around Los Angeles; and, with fellow artists Sharon Lockhart and Marnie Weber, painting the walls of Mel Gibson’s Malibu mansion to look faux-old.
There are moments when Stark and her work can seem a welcome antidote to an over-commercialized, gimmick-strewn art world – to represent, as Janet Malcolm once wrote of the avant-garde, “the conscience of the culture, not its id.” But when we met earlier this year at her home, one-half of a classic midcentury modern-style house in South Pasadena stuffed with books and art and comfy chairs, I found her suffering what appeared to be a low-grade nervous breakdown. She had been sick for two weeks and was despairing over at least half a dozen things, including her own ambivalence about her upcoming retrospectives (“What does it mean to be retrospective?”) and her place in contemporary culture. “I’m almost 50 years old and still having to do cartwheels and jumping jacks to get people’s attention,” she said. “I’m exhausted and psychologically falling to pieces. I’m broke, too. Why am I broke?”
Credit. Paint pen and paillettes on paper, 25 3?16 x 20 3?16 in. (64 x 51.3 cm). Private collection, Cologne. Image courtesy of Galerie Buchholz, Cologne & Berlin
It is hard to think of any artists who do not somehow mine their personal lives for material, but for Stark, art feeds back into life until it, too, is remade. In the three years since they met, she and Bobby Jesus have become almost ine up with “Jesus.”) She takes him to exhibitions and parties and has made several works drawn from his life story. After spending time in her orbit, he has ambitions to be a gallerist, and Stark is currently helping him secure a space in an old furniture factory in South Los Angeles. She describes him with an impressive range of terms including friend, confidant, sometime studio help and muse. (“I’m a single mother and Bobby is a brother to my son and we all live together,” she recently wrote to me when I inquired about the nature of their relationship. “Yes Bobby is handsome and sexy and 20 years younger than me and the reader can project on us whatever they want.”) Bobby Jesus, for his part, calls his relationship to Stark a kind of “education,” and his newfound environment “The House of Frances,” like a fashion line.
